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A year late, I thought of the perfect analogy to describe Occupy's impotence ( Read more... ) -
Meritocracy
Do we live in a meritocracy? I used to say not, but it just occurred to me recently that I was thinking about it the wrong way. Just like biological selection, social meritocracy is value-neutral. The only "value" it selects for is success. So it's not that we don't live in a meritocracy; it's that we live in a meritocracy that doesn't ( Read more... ) -
Riddle me this.
How come the same people who insist that government can't possibly compete with private enterprise are the first to whine that it shouldn't when it does? -
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It's always seemed strange to me that so many Evangelical Christians support Israel, when so many of them are also so rabidly anti-Semitic. (Martin Luther called Jewry "an incorrigible whore and an evil slut" and advocated sending Jews to forced labor camps ( Read more... ) -
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Real-world markets quickly cease to function unless the government regulates market failures and externalities. One of the market failures the government is responsible for regulating is the exploitation of weaknesses in consumer knowledge. Note that this does not mean the government is responsible for educating consumers ( Read more... ) -
Hope
Hope without reason isn't hope; it's foolishness. Hope can be calculated and measured. Anything less is self-deception. I'm not interested in tricking myself into being happy; I'm interested in finding reasons to be happy. -
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A point eloquently made by Slashdot user causality:
When some kid at school is acting like a total dipshit to everyone else and the authorities don't care, the solution is not to ask him politely to stop. The solution is to give him a black eye, then ask, then give him another if he refuses.While I would place emphasis on the "authorities don't ( Read more... ) -
Denying Their Roots
There can certainly be more than one valid paradigm for describing the history of feminism. But I recently encountered a new phenomenon among Fourth Wavers: not content to use a new paradigm of their own device, they've decided to completely reject the Waves paradigm ( Read more... ) -
Is this the "change" Obama promised?
Like the magnetic poles of our planet which reverse their polarities on million-year time scales, our nation's two dominant political parties - and there have almost always been two - have at times flip-flopped the voter ideologies they court. Perhaps best remembered is the reversal that accompanied the Civil Rights Movement, when the Democratic ( Read more... ) -
Cultural Feedback
Facts are not culturally bound, but the importance of knowing them is. If you asked members of a hunter-gatherer society what six times eight is, they might not know the answer. They might not even understand the question. But you would be wrong to conclude from this that they are stupid. Multiplication simply isn't important to their culture ( Read more... )